The Fastest Graphics Cards of 2003. Page 11

Quite a lot of people buy hardware and software to play with during the upcoming holidays late this month. Some buy consoles, some get new games, others acquire new graphics cards. This review will help you to choose between 9 premier graphics cards based on VPUs and GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA in 16 benchmarks representing performance in past, present and upcoming 3D games! In addition to benchmarks, we have market analysis for you.

Graphics Cards 2003

We are going to undertake an all-out benchmarking of contemporary graphics cards of the mainstream and top-end classes to help you find the king of 3D graphics and get decided about your shopping. It’s no secret modern graphics cards are mostly used for gaming, so we excluded theoretical (synthetic) tests in favor of modern games. We’ve got nine graphics cards in total. Make your stakes, here’s the list of the participators from the “Premier League”:

There’s no typo – we’ve really included a RADEON 9500 into the review. This “oldie” is hale enough to show its teeth (eight pipelines!) to the “youngsters”. As for the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, we of course used the new version of the card with 400MHz/400MHz (800MHz DDR) frequencies.

You may have encountered some of the cards as we reviewed them earlier. New to our site are the GeXcube RADEON XT and the Built by ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB. We’ll examine them shortly.

Built by ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB

We tested some RADEON 9800 PRO-based graphics cards previously, but this time we were lucky enough to lay our hands on the original RADEON 9800 PRO Built by ATI solution with 128MB of memory.

The graphics card came to our test lab in its retail package, designed in sober-looking red-black-silver colors. Its unusual size – the length nearly matches the height – distinguishes it from other cards’ packages that are usually oblong. We’ve got a card and an ordinary set of accessories inside:

ATI RADEON 9800 PRO graphics card;

DVI-I-to-D-Sub adapter;

S-Video-to-RCA adapter;

S-Video cable;

User manual;

Driver CD.

There’s no use searching for any games. Even the DVD Player came on the Driver CD. ATI Technologies must have decided to ship its legendary quality without any allurements.